Manhattan Madam to Eliot Spitzer: ‘Gosh, It’s Going to Be a Fun Race!’

Kristin Davis, the “Manhattan Madam” who was jailed for supplying call girls to former Governor Eliot Spitzer in his infamous, resignation-inducing prostitution scandal, says she’s going to challenge her former client in the comptroller’s race.

“Bring it on,” a surprised Ms. Davis told Politicker during an interview Sunday night, moments after learning that Mr. Spitzer was planning to jump into the electoral arena days before the petitioning deadline. The news also shocked the city’s political establishment and turned the formerly uncontested race on its head.

“Gosh, it’s going to be a fun race!” she exclaimed.

Ms. Davis, of course, isn’t new to politics. She ran against Andrew Cuomo in the 2010 governor’s race, and has been long been mulling a run for citywide office on the independently-petitioned Libertarian Party line, first throwing her hat into the mayor’s race and then looking elsewhere for a potential long-shot bid. (Mr. Spitzer is challenging front-running comptroller candidate Scott Stringer, Manhattan’s borough president, in the Democratic primary.)

But she said she’d long ago vowed to challenge Mr. Spitzer if he ever ran for public office again.

“I can’t let that go,” said Ms. Davis. His ability to emerge unscathed from the scandal while she was sent to jail “made me sick,” she explained, adding that she thinks she’s a far better candidate.

“Quite frankly, I’m more qualified for comptroller than Eliot Spitzer,” she argued, pointing to the ten years she spent as the senior vice president of a $5 billion hedge fund. “Math, budgeting, finance. That’s what my college degree’s in and that’s what I did for most of my adult life. You know, he’s an attorney, not an accountant. So he’s not really qualified for that race.”

Ms. Davis further slammed Mr. Spitzer as a publicity-hound who is desperate to return to politics and looking to wipe the slate clean by jumping into a race that he perceives as weak.

“He disgraced the entire state,” she said. “We’re already $2.2 billion in debt. I don’t see him as being the guy to turn that situation around. He’s just a power-hungry person … It would be a disgrace for the City of New York to allow an unpunished criminal who committed multiple felonies to be re-elected back into office.”

She pointed to former Congressman Anthony Weiner, who is running for mayor just two years after he was forced to resign in the wake of a sexting scandal.

“I think that we look like a huge joke to the rest of the county,” she said, adding that, if Mr. Spitzer were to win, she plans to pack her bags and leave New York City for good. “Weiner, what he did it was minimal compared to Spitzer,” she said.